The Year of Second Chances, page 7
A bubble arose as Jake typed, then disappeared. I put my phone aside and tried to concentrate on the sheet of drywall being pummeled by a hammer, my heart beating. A ding from my phone. I scrambled.
I am now! Jake wrote.
And there it was in my belly, the promise of the app, almost like nausea, but lighter, sweeter, sparkling. Bubbles.
7
The most random thing I’ve done . . .
Ate peanut butter M&Ms while watching a mosh pit.
This time I was going to do it right. There would be no sweating, no impromptu trips to Target, no ancient businesswear, no finger-gunning, and by god, no mention of my late husband. I was going to keep it light and breezy. Over the week, Jake and I had found a few acquaintances in common, and it was also discovered that he worked in third-party risk at Target headquarters, just a few blocks away. Soon, we had moved from messaging via the Bubbl app to messaging by phone, sending each other pictures from our respective offices, trading anecdotes about the best little Vietnamese and North African spots in the skyway. Earlier that week, I had jokingly suggested we carpool, but he preferred to drive to a park and ride near the Mall of America and bike the Greenway. Impressive, I told him. My husband used to I had begun to type and stopped myself. No repeat of the Widow Humiliation Show. No Gabe. I deleted the text before I could send. Another message from Jake came through: Would I like to meet him at the Pole City Fall Fest on Sunday? I would. It had been years since I’d been to Fall Fest, I told him, and it had always been my dream to solve the infamous corn maze in under fifteen minutes. Odd and very specific dream, he replied, but okay. You’re on.
Since then, I kept looking at the messages to confirm they were real. I couldn’t believe the words on the screen were mine, that my presence on the app was powerful enough to incite a positive response from a handsome stranger. The messages were like a glimpse into the life of someone else, and on Sunday, I would need to act like her, to look like her. No, not someone else. Like myself, better. On Friday, I texted Theo to see if he would go shopping with me.
No, he responded. You know I’m not that type of gay.
It was true. Neither of us had ever been the glitzy type, and our mom, with her grease-spotted apron and decades-old blue eye shadow, was hardly a model of grace and poise.
I’m not asking you because you’re gay, I’m asking you because you’re my friend, I responded. And I need help. I need a date look.
Aw <3, Theo wrote back. Idk, I just buy whatever is suggested to me on Instagram.
“With my money,” I muttered to my phone.
I decided to text Marcy Reyes, a friend from Sisters in Grief. What’s the name of your stylist again? I asked her, adding a haircut emoji for casual effect.
Mercedes, Marcy replied and sent me the woman’s contact info, no questions asked. But DO NOT be late or criticize, Marcy followed up. She’s a genius but she’s very particular.
Jake hadn’t mentioned a time I should meet him, I realized. Was I allowed to ask him about the time, or was that too eager? Should I text him again about some other aspect of the date, and simply hope he picked up on the fact that I was seeking information? Should I text him about something unrelated to the date, so as to display my nonchalance? I googled what to text someone before a date.
The advice was to keep it simple and lighthearted, to avoid heavy subjects or mundane questions. It was decided: I should not directly ask him about the time. Asking someone the time could be perceived as mundane.
I went with, I am looking forward to our date.
Same! he responded.
But I really wanted to know the time. I was not a spontaneous or laid-back person. The weather during that morning should be nice! I sent.
The idea was, if he had a time other than morning in mind, this would invite him to contradict me and propose the actual time. I congratulated myself on my cleverness.
Yep, supposed to be clear all day, he wrote. Then nothing.
I realized with a jolt: weather is the most mundane topic of all human conversation. It literally happens to everyone, every single moment of every day. I was ruining the date before it even began. I banged my head on my desk.
All afternoon, I jumped at every little ding, hoping Jake had replied, but it was just emails trickling in, then flooding. The accounting manager for the entire company had conducted another training on the new payroll system, and no one understood what was going on—except, apparently, for me. Soon, it was past six, and the clerks from soaps, cleaners, and even plastics were gathered in a conference room with their laptops while I ran an impromptu training, explaining and re-explaining the functions my manager had not understood enough to illustrate properly. After a hearty thanks and compliment session, I had a brief moment of satisfaction, only to realize that all of my efforts to help the others had caused my own tasks to pile up.
I returned to my office with a Pop-Tart from the vending machine and worked until my screen’s glow felt like the only light in the building.
Still no word from Jake.
As the elevator slid down to the lobby, I combed through Gabe’s email for a little comfort, as I had a million times before, wishing his matchmaking scheme came with a manual. That way I could read his vision for me and follow the steps, and I would know when I was doing it right. It would be like when I used to edit his speeches for Memorial Day and dedication events—I wasn’t perfect at grammar, but I could understand him better than anyone, break down his big, wandering ideas and make them simple and efficient. He used to lean over the desk while I reviewed his drafts, breathing gently next to my ear as he read, occasionally absent-mindedly kissing me on the cheek.
When I reached the street, the wind cut across my cheeks. My phone dinged. It was Jake. What time works for you on Sunday?
The butterflies inside resurrected, though now they were beginning to feel bigger, more substantive. More like pterodactyls.
That Sunday, what was supposed to be an autumnal sun beat down on my heavily made-up face. I had woken up early—though, I hadn’t really slept, half-due to nerves, half-due to the fact that I had propped myself up with pillows for fear of ruining what was admittedly an impeccable blowout I’d had from Mercedes the day before. By the time she was done, the strands around my face were arranged to make me look ten years younger. Marcy was right: she was a genius.
This morning, I had carefully risen from bed to follow a YouTube makeup tutorial, opting for a natural look, which, in my hands, turned into more of a late-career Elizabeth Taylor look. I’d always been a little heavy-handed and Halloweeny with makeup. Having risen early, I didn’t account for the fact that I would have to eat without ruining said look, nor did I anticipate falling asleep on my couch midmorning during an episode of 90 Day Fiancé, or having to slather on more makeup to fix the nap-induced smudges and gaps. Now, I stood in the unseasonable warmth between two hay bales in Pole City, waiting for Jake and breaking my promise to myself that I would not sweat.
This was Fall Fest, was it not? Fall in Minnesota, where one shivered against the creeping chill and tucked one’s hands into sweaters, cupping mugs full of hot liquids. I had worn wool socks inside my boots and optimistically purchased a fitted flannel Oxford, tight corduroy pants, and a bomber jacket with a few extraneous zippers. As I scanned the crowd for Jake, jacket under my arm, beads of moisture pricked my scalp. It must have been seventy degrees.
I saw him before he saw me. He had stepped out of his gold Prius in the parking lot, wearing a ball cap, a T-shirt, and Docker-ish pants that hugged a taut, ropy frame that was just a couple of inches taller than me. He was smaller than many men I’d been attracted to, but he carried himself with ease. My eyes were drawn to the outline of his muscles under his shirt. Behind his Ray Ban–style sunglasses, he seemed to catch me staring. I waved, suddenly conscious of how heavy and floppy hands could be.
“Should have ridden my bike here,” he said as he got closer, reaching his arms out and lifting his face toward the sun. “It’s like June. I love it.”
“Should have worn shades,” I said, pointing to my face.
Without hesitating, he wrapped me in a warm hug, as if we were old friends reuniting. When he released, I realized I had forgotten to breathe.
Jake nodded toward the festivities, putting his hands on his thin hips. “This is my friend’s land. Or rather, his family’s. They rent it out to the city every year.”
“Very cool,” I said, and I meant it. Again, Gabe’s name rose to my mouth, about to tell him about our own little patch of dirt, but I caught it before I could break my own rule.
“We used to camp here, like, every weekend. See that big tree?”
I shaded my eyes. Off in the distance, beyond the carnival games and Ferris wheel, an oak with gnarled branches and yellowing leaves rose over the rest of the tree line. “It’s beautiful.”
“Right?” Jake continued. “In the summers we’d just bring sleeping bags out here and build a fire and hang out all night. Have rock-throwing contests. Sometimes we still get out here on the weekends, but all my high school friends have kids now, so . . .”
“Mine, too,” I told him, and we exchanged a look of kinship. Birth rates were declining across the world, but not in these hundred square miles. I could always entertain the idea of having children, but Gabe had never wanted them. He always used to tell me that he was called to public service, not fatherhood. The citizens were his kids.
As Jake and I walked side by side, exchanging more stories about the area, I snuck glances at him, enjoying the way his jaw cut a shadow across his winged shoulders, the way his nose sharpened under his frames. There was something so confident in his manner, the athletic bounce in his stride, his decision to shave his head—it was thinning, he’d told me, so he’d said screw it, he decided to get rid of it altogether. The bare skin of his scalp peeked out from under his baseball cap. I’d never been attracted to a man without hair before, but there weren’t many men without hair who had a face like Jake’s. On the hayride, I sat with my hip touching his, leaning against him as we hit the curves. Soon, we were making our way down the line of games, shooting bottles with air rifles and fishing for ducks. I dreaded to think what the sweat was doing to my YouTube tutorial creation, but I stopped caring after a while, sailing in giddiness, nostalgia. My limbs felt light, casting off the little balls during a “shooting hoops” game as if they were magnetically compelled into the net. I was having fun.
When the buzzer sounded, I grabbed a handful of napkins from the concession cart to wipe my face. Across the grounds, kids screeched with delight on the Ferris wheel. As I patted foundation off my skin, I could smell butter from the popcorn, cinnamon from the cider.
“Want to do the corn maze?” he called from a few feet away.
I pressed a napkin to my closed eyelids. “Give me a sec, hon,” I replied.
All my nerves ignited before I knew why. I froze. Had he heard me? I lowered the napkin but couldn’t bring myself to lift my eyes from the ground. My pulse pounded. Maybe I could pretend like it didn’t happen. I had called him hon.
I risked a look. Jake had his head turned away from me, watching the Ferris wheel. The endorphins from the basketball game had helicoptered me into some other time, some other dimension where the man I used to call honey was still alive, still waiting for me to wipe sweat off my brow so we could complete the Pole City Fall Fest corn maze. My mind had not kept up with my senses, and my senses had fallen back into the past.
Jake, in the meantime, gave me a curious look, smiling. “Ready?” But it wasn’t Gabe’s smile. Of course it wasn’t.
“Ready.” I smiled back, relieved.
He seemed to have not heard, or if he had, maybe he just presumed the hon was commonplace. Maybe he thought I was like an old-timey waitress who called everyone hon. Calm down, I told myself. Different man. Different hair. No parenthesis wrinkle near the mouth. Jake was far from Gabe 2.0, and everything was fine. I was still following the rules. Except for the sweat.
As we breached the maze, I set the timer on my watch.
“She’s serious,” he said, his thin face cracking into a giant smile. “We’re actually doing this.”
“Oh, yeah, buddy. We’re doing this.” I had already gotten a few paces ahead of him—paces, I knew, that he would probably make up with his active stride.
We took a right. It was a pretty standard move, I told Jake, but this was supposed to be a pretty standard maze, as far as I remembered from the last time I was here, which meant that the path either followed a diagonal or some sort of circle.
But turning right had brought us to a dead end. “Oh, no!” I wailed.
Jake laughed and pointed back toward the beginning, to which we sailed as fast as my legs could go. Going left yielded better progress, bringing us into a series of uninterrupted zigzags. Time was ticking, but we might still beat the fifteen-minute mark.
“I have a feeling we’re circling the center,” I told Jake. “Maybe the end of the maze isn’t actually the exit.”
“Do you, like, do mazes in your spare time?”
“I’ve always been good at puzzles,” I told him as we followed a narrow corn-flanked corridor. “I’ve always liked them.”
“Oh, yeah? What else do you do for fun?”
“Um . . .” We’d reached a fork in the road. I was having trouble answering. Like all the what are you up to queries of all the nice guys before him, I didn’t really have much of an answer. I watched a lot of TV and movies, I could say, but judging by all of his surfing and camping and biking, the number of Scream sequels I could quote probably wouldn’t make a favorable impression. “Let’s go right,” I said, hoping he would drop the subject.
But my choice, once again, led us to an unyielding wall of corn. I tried to shrug it off as we backtracked. We were both silent as we made our way back to the fork. The other direction quickly led us to another fork, where I brought us right again.
Another dead end.
“I thought you said you were good at this,” Jake said playfully, brushing his hand across the drooping green leaves.
For some reason this bothered me more than I would have liked. Not for any reason related to Jake: I knew he was joking. But something to do with me. Something to do with the fact that I couldn’t answer his question about my idea of fun. My chest was tight, and there was a pricking in the corners of my eyes. Why was I getting emotional? Because of a stupid fucking maze? Come on. Though I had cried a lot over the past twelve months, I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried recently. I hadn’t even let myself shed tears on the one-year anniversary. I pushed away these thoughts and looked at my watch. Thirteen minutes we’d been weaving. Two minutes to beat the record. I began to jog. My lungs and legs immediately protested, but I kept going.
“Slow down, turbo,” Jake called, still walking behind me.
“We don’t have much time!” I called over my shoulder.
Jake laughed. “Wow, hey, is there some sort of imminent threat I don’t know about? Do we need to get to the center of this maze to dismantle a bomb or something?”
He had a point. I was being intense. For good reason, I thought, but I couldn’t quite say what that reason was. I slowed. When he caught up to me, I pointed over his shoulder, trying to mask my disappointment. “You know what we should have done? Gone on the Ferris wheel to get a better look at the overall layout.”
“What were we thinking?” Jake said, shaking his head, still chuckling.
After what felt like hours but was probably minutes, we finally found the center, a clearing of razed corn where more maze-solvers rested on a circle of hay bales. I had tried not to check my watch, but I couldn’t help it: twenty-eight minutes. I collapsed on a bale, discarding my jacket, and gladly accepted Jake’s offer to get us some refreshment from the small stand. My chest was still tight, but I chalked that up to being out of shape. Jake was still moving easily, naturally. He clearly belonged. Good at puzzles. I wanted to kick myself. Even if it was true, it was a very lame thing to be good at. Why couldn’t I have an actual hobby? Like Rollerblading? No, that was probably even lamer.
I looked up from my lap. A short-haired, pinkish-skinned, middle-aged woman was walking toward me, sporting a Packers windbreaker.
“Mrs. Mayor herself! I thought that was you! Haven’t seen you out and about.” She stood above me, her eyes and smile a little too big, a little too bright.
“Hi, Tammy,” I said, not bothering to correct the Mrs. Mayor designation, though it had always annoyed me. Mom and Theo always thought it was hilarious. I nodded toward the exit of the maze. “Are you enjoying the—”
“Did you see my Facebook post, by the way?” Tammy cut me off. “I tagged you.”
“I must have missed it.”
Tammy looked at me like I had cursed her mother. “It was a tribute to Gabe. I got all these old photos I dug from the campaign email inbox. There were five hundred likes. Maybe seventy comments. It was beautiful. But the whole time I was thinking, where is Robin? She’s the one who should be liking this.”
My chest continued to contract. I took a step away from Tammy, hoping this would free up some more oxygen. “I haven’t been on Facebook for a while.” For exactly that reason. It wasn’t as if anyone was trying to get a hold of me for any present concerns. My wall was basically a digital altar.
“You check it out and let me know what you think. I think you’ll enjoy it. Who’s your friend?”
Jake had sidled next to me with a sweating bottle of water. I took the water, opened it, and gulped. “I’m Jake,” he said as I chugged, offering his hand.
I should handle this, somehow, I was thinking. I needed to excuse Jake and me from this interaction so I could keep this date from imploding. The rule was No Gabe. Tammy was All Gabe. It’s possible she even had nursed a crush on him. As I swallowed water, I saw her eyes move to Jake’s left hand. She was putting things together.
